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Posts in “Research”

Some weeks ago a book was returned to us, and its back cover caught my eye. As it happens, the book itself, as well as its author, are well worth examination, even though they seem not to be as well known as they should be. For those of you who are unfamiliar with her, Marie Goebel Kimball was...

Guest commentary It is a rare thing for historians of early American foreign policy to see their subject discussed on national cable outlets. In the mid-1990s, when I first began my research on the Barbary War, the last major study of the subject had sat on library shelves for nearly 60 years and...

October, 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of Meriwether Lewis 's bizarre death, and oh what a smorgasbord of Lewisiana there is to wallow around in this year. This past Sunday the Chicago Sun-Times reviewed the latest Lewis biography , by Thomas Danisi and John Jackson; there also seems to have...

I've been curiously watching the flutterings about this in the news for the past week or so - the Seattle Atheists are running a bus ad campaign featuring quotations by Jefferson and some other people. (You can see images of all three ads here .) Before anybody asks, that is in fact a genuine...

Well, it's the 144th birthday of Paul Leicester Ford. I know you're asking, who the heck's that guy? (Or maybe you're not, if you work at the Papers of Thomas Jefferson/Retirement Series ). But perhaps you don't know about all the fascinating and cool things he did, so I'll tell you: published his...

American Scientist is getting a lot of mileage out of Jefferson lately. In the March-April 2009 issue of American Scientist , mathematician Lawren Smithline helps out the folks at the Papers of Thomas Jefferson by decoding a supposedly-unbreakably-encoded message sent to Jefferson by Philadelphia smarty-pants Robert Patterson in 1801.

Most quotations we're asked about sound nothing like Thomas Jefferson, but since I can't pin down their true source, they sort of hang frustratingly out there in Quotation Limbo. So it gives me great satisfaction to be able to actually run one to ground once in a while. I just laid this one to rest...

Well, it took me all day but I plowed through all of the Google Alerts I've gotten in the past week (even the weekend ones, that's how dedicated I am), just as I said I would , and came up with the following numbers: A total of 22 websites quoted TJ in some form or fashion. (Mind you, the Alert...

The Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello announces the release of Religion, State and Society: Jefferson's Wall of Separation in Comparative Perspective , a compilation of essays that examine the separation of religion and state in a comparative perspective with...

Oh happy day: volume 5 of Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series has arrived. This brings us up through March 1813 - only 13 years, 3 months, and 4 days to go! (Er, plus the remaining seven years of his presidency .) In this installment, TJ "receives many requests for governmental patronage...